“Drawing Attributes”
CSA Space presents “Drawing Attributes” from December 15, 2016 until January 15, 2017.
There will be an opening reception December 15, 2016 from 6 – 9pm
At the invitation of CSA, the “See you next Thursday” collective behind the Schneiderei exhibition space in Vienna Austria will create a collaborative exhibition with works that deliberately provoke the security of their individual practices. Artists in the project include Abdul Sharif Baruwa, Johann Groebner, Lia Karl, Bina Klingler, Vasco Costa, Fernando Mesquita, Wolfgang Obermair, Lisa Ruyter, and a number of other collaborators.
The organizing narrative of “Drawing Attributes” is about trans-identities, and the contradictions in how these identities function in different locations. “Drawing” and “Attributes” here are both meant to have multiple meanings. Drawing can be creating and research, as in an individual practice, and at the same time drawing forth an engagement with an audience or bringing another artist or individual into the conversation. Attributes are the stuff of identity, the things that we adopt as guidelines for our own movements in life as well as those imposed on us by others (and ourselves) due to the color of our skin, our language, our sexual orientation or our residency status and nationality.
In the background is the rapidly changing environment of cultural politics, from both a Canadian and European point of view. A series of crises are transforming global and local political identities, allowing opportunists both left and right to dig in on their positions. There are a growing number of people who do not fall into easily attributive categories of race, gender and statehood that represent a new global reality and highlight a need to create a new language of accommodation that is being met with frightening nationalistic tendencies instead.
Schneiderei is an art space that is dedicated to supporting cooperative artistic methods in the context of the Vienna art scene.

“Already many of the surrounding buildings had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation. Huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs. Beyond the lagoon, the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate into enormous glittering banks, here and there overtopping the shoreline like the immense tippings of some distant goldmine.”
- JG Ballard , The Drowned World.

Inversus Mundi takes coal as the material and metaphorical staring point for a series of works that reflect on fortune, fate, self-determination, ruin, and political resistance in the abandoned coal-mining town of Corbin, British Columbia. A century ago Corbin was populated with growing families of hopeful immigrants working in the service of a booming industrial venture. Today rusted machine parts and railway sleepers are overgrown with grass, the bridges over the creek beds have vanished, long since carried away by the current, and the lodgings, constructed from old railway boxcars, are slowly disintegrating into the earth. While the nearby mine continues to gut the earth, Corbin’s enduring ghosts continue to dwell alongside local flora and fauna that have since repopulated the forgotten town site.

The exhibition envisions a world inverted, where, through human processes of excavation and extraction, an alter-world is uncovered. Many of the works included are derived from locally sourced material and are often conceived of and created on-site. Within this framework Corbin Union also recognizes bleakness, unknowability, wealth, yearning, and the metaphysical as productive filters for the site’s past, present, and future to both excavate and generate an important and largely unwritten story.

Corbin Union Inversus Mundi

Nov 4 - Dec 17, 2016

Inversus Mundi takes coal as the starting point for works that concentrate on fortune, fate, self-determination, ruin & resistance.

“Already many of the surrounding buildings had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation. Huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs. Beyond the lagoon, the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate into enormous glittering banks, here and there overtopping the shoreline like the immense tippings of some distant goldmine.”
- JG Ballard , The Drowned World.

Inversus Mundi takes coal as the material and metaphorical staring point for a series of works that reflect on fortune, fate, self-determination, ruin, and political resistance in the abandoned coal-mining town of Corbin, British Columbia. A century ago Corbin was populated with growing families of hopeful immigrants working in the service of a booming industrial venture. Today rusted machine parts and railway sleepers are overgrown with grass, the bridges over the creek beds have vanished, long since carried away by the current, and the lodgings, constructed from old railway boxcars, are slowly disintegrating into the earth. While the nearby mine continues to gut the earth, Corbin’s enduring ghosts continue to dwell alongside local flora and fauna that have since repopulated the forgotten town site.

The exhibition envisions a world inverted, where, through human processes of excavation and extraction, an alter-world is uncovered. Many of the works included are derived from locally sourced material and are often conceived of and created on-site. Within this framework Corbin Union also recognizes bleakness, unknowability, wealth, yearning, and the metaphysical as productive filters for the site’s past, present, and future to both excavate and generate an important and largely unwritten story.